Heather O’Donnell and Rebecca Romney of Brooklyn-based Honey & Wax feel the historically male-dominated profession of antiquarian bookselling needs to be more welcoming to women and have suggested a few ways such change could come about.

Whether or not the name of A.N. Devers’s bookstore The Second Shelf plays on French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir’s landmark treatise on feminist philosophy The Second Sex, her endeavor certainly stems from a similar desire for equality—in this case, to balance the bookshelves for men and women writers.

"If ever there was an impulse to collect that appeals directly to the intellect, it is the urge to acquire and possess books and their various cousins, manuscripts, printed ephemera, prints and the like". Nicholas Basbanes in the foreward to "Rare Books Uncovered" by Rebecca Rego Barry